Tapped: The Prospect Group Blog

As an attorney and judge, Brett Kavanaugh has done everything in his power to limit the rights of people with disabilities. As a Supreme Court justice, he would have the ability to do even more damage, rolling back decades of progress in the field of disability rights—and civil rights more broadly.

As a disabled Latina, I’ve watched these hearings with my life and personal autonomy at stake. The disability community shudders at the possible elevation of Kavanaugh to the nation’s highest court. In these times, disability advocates are fighting to fully obtain and keep the most basic of our rights—such as health care and personal autonomy. People with disabilities continue to experience cuts to Medicaid, a program that means the difference between living in the community and being institutionalized (and for some, life or death) and threats to the Affordable Care Act, including the provision protecting individuals with pre-existing conditions.

The ADA Education and Reform Act of 2017, which passed the House this earlier year, would significantly weaken the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Although the vast majority of Kavanaugh’s records have not been made public, his jurisprudence offers a glimpse into his philosophy.

InDoe Tarlow v. District of Columbia, a 2007 D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals case, three people with intellectual disabilities living in an institutional setting in Washington, D.C., believed their due process rights were abridged when doctors would not consider their wishes in elective surgeries. This case highlights the attacks against disabled individuals’ dignity in medical decision-making and gives doctors and others sole authority over people’s lives. Kavanaugh’s opinion undermined the self-determination of people with intellectual disabilities to consent to elective surgeries.

Disability groups also point to Kavanaugh’s record of giving deference to employers in disability discrimination cases Disability groups worry in particular about his dissent in Miller v. Clinton, a 2012 Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) case that ruled against a mandatory retirement age for State Department workers.

Kavanaugh disagreed with the majority that “extremely important” federal statutory proscriptions against age, disability, race, religion, and sex discrimination prevented the termination of a 65-year-old employee. Additionally, Kavanaugh dissented in a ruling upholding the ACA, which is crucial to the well-being of disabled people, and has demonstrated his aversion to administrative regulations and enforcement of civil rights laws. Administrative agencies—such as Health and Human Services, the Departments of Justice and Education, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission—play large roles in the interpretation, implementation, and regulation of disability rights laws.

Itis no surprise that Kavanaugh’s nomination to the high court comes from a scandal-plagued president who went along with the Federalist Society’s choice of a white male judge—one who is on record as stating that a sitting president should not be subject to investigation. This is a judge who will assuredly undermine Roe v. Wade and the Affordable Care Act, weaken federal civil rights regulations, defer to corporations, and set American democracy back.

Advocates for people with disabilities do not know much more about Kavanaugh’s views on disability. I am not persuaded by his statements that he is the type of judge who puts himself in others’ shoes and is deeply impacted by his work giving food to the homeless, many of whom have mental disabilities.

People with disabilities do not need charity from those who would go on to dismiss our opinions. What the disability community needs more than leaders who purport to empathize are leaders who are disabled themselves—and we need them at every level of the judiciary, including the Supreme Court.

Progressives fighting the Kavanaugh nomination should be appalled by the fact that the professional track to the Supreme Court weighs heavily against disabled individuals. The National Association for Law Placement reported last year that there are on average 0.6 percent or fewer attorneys with disabilities in American law firms. Individuals with disabilities are underrepresented as attorneys, judges, politicians, and countless other professions that ultimately decide the fate of people with disabilities.

In November, the Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, part of Loyola Marymount University, also will launch a Center for Disability Law, Policy, & Innovation that I will head. The center seeks to increase the numbers of attorneys with disabilities. This is progress. Still, more needs to be done.

Whether or not Kavanaugh moves to the high court, his confirmation hearings give Americans the opportunity to take stock of how far we have come and how far we have to go: What kind of investment is being made in our next leaders in disability rights—disabled law students, attorneys, and judges? A decade from now, when we are litigating disability rights at the highest court, will Kavanaugh—and all the other attorneys and judges being groomed for the Supreme Court—understand our experiences?

I don’t know about you, but I want at least one disabled judge on the high court who believes that disabled people deserve equal rights. This is the time that matters. The disability rights movement continues to pursue fairness and equality, especially in the court system where the laws that affect our lives are made.

A couple of months ago, I was summoned for jury duty for the federal district court in D.C. for a “special” four-week trial, the “pre-selection” process for which was set to begin today, the Tuesday after Labor Day.

A quick search on the district court’s website said that “special” trials were “mainly high-profile.” “Maybe it’s Manafort!” I joked to my friends.

I was 99 percent certain I would not be chosen to serve on any jury, much less a high-profile one, but I blocked off the month just in case. I took my coffee creamer out of the office refrigerator, finished up stories I was working on, and even set up an out-of-office reply. I mean, I could be gone for four weeks!

On Monday night, I followed the instructions on my jury summons form and called the juror phone line to see what time I needed to report to court.

“Your jury service is over,” the automated voice said. “We appreciate your serving as a juror in the United States District Court.”

Was there a mistake? Did I really not have to go? I called back. Same message.

I considered that members of the press will be barred from being in the courtroom during jury selection in the Manafort trial. I considered this piece, where I referred to the Trump administration’s white nationalism. And this one, in which I called Trump himself racist.

It was probably the Manafort trial.

And then this morning, about 120 potential jurors with purple jury summonses identical to mine made their way to the court and were told the trial was Manafort’s. They’ll fill out a written questionnaire that’s meant to weed out those too familiar with the case, and official jury selection, when jurors are questioned individually, begins on September 17.

Manafort was recently convicted of eight charges of tax and bank fraud in an Alexandria, Virginia, federal court. U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson said that the jury selection process will probably take longer and be more difficult than that of the trial in Virginia because people in D.C. are more likely to follow politics.

Unfortunately, all you will get from this potential juror is this blog post—and I won’t get the book deal I was hoping for.

On Thursday, President Trump sent a letter to Congress making clear he wants to freeze federal employees’ pay for 2019. Here’s what his letter said:

Under current law, locality pay increases averaging 25.70 percent, costing $25 billion, would go into effect in January 2019, in addition to a 2.1 percent across-the-board increase for the base General Schedule. We must maintain efforts to put our Nation on a fiscally sustainable course, and Federal agency budgets cannot sustain such increases.

How prudent that our president wants to maintain a fiscally sustainable course. Imagine, a budget increase costing $25 billion! Of course, that pales somewhat when compared with the $1.8 trillion tax cut Trump and the Republicans enacted late last year, but then that was largely directed to the wealthiest Americans, many of whom are now recycling those funds productively by donating a share of them to Republicans’ election campaigns, and since Republicans are fiscally prudent, the tax cut, though at first glance blowing a hole in the budget 72 times larger than the amount of the raise to federal employees that Trump cites in his letter, was actually an exercise in fiscal prudence.

In a letter sent to Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Tuesday, more than 120 law professors denounced the Justice Department’s new performance metrics for immigration judges as a danger to due process and an infringement on judicial independence.

Administrative and immigration law professors from at least 30 states warned that, while the current backlog of immigration cases, many of which are asylum requests, awaiting adjudication (more than 700,000, at last count) warranted action by the Justice Department, case quotas would come at too great a cost.

“Instead of providing adequate resources or implementing other case management tactics, the Department of Justice has proposed the case completion quotas,” the letter reads. “We believe that these quotas show disregard for the importance of independence, including avoidance of a conflict of interest, in adjudication. The quotas seem to align with President Trump’s displeasure with the need for process in immigration cases.”

Following an Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) memo released in April, immigration judges are now expected to complete at least 700 cases per year and have fewer than 15 percent of their rulings overturned on appeal. Judges who fail to meet the quota will be deemed unsatisfactory or “needing improvement” and could face discipline.

The letter’s authors argue that the new quotas will pressure immigrant judges already stretched thin to rush complicated and weighty cases, thereby denying immigrants enough time to find a lawyer or collect evidence for their case. Instead of quotas, the law professors said the Justice Department should hire more judges, provide more support staff, and increase funding to the courts (solutions largely backed by Democrats and Republicans alike, as well as immigration judges themselves).

Immigrant advocates warn that the quotas could lead to an increase in erroneous deportations of immigrants, forcing many to return to the violence and persecution in their home countries that led them to apply for asylum in the first place.

“The purpose of implementing these metrics is to encourage efficient and effective case management while preserving immigration judge discretion and due process,” an EOIR spokesperson told the Prospect in response to the letter.

Immigration judges are technically considered attorney employees of the Justice Department and, as such, don’t have the same independence that other federal judges might have. This in-between status has left immigration courts particularly vulnerable to political pressure. And in the case of the Trump administration, Sessions has begun to repurpose the courts as an extension of his hardline anti-immigrant ideology.

In addition to the new quotas, the attorney general has also tied the hands of immigration judges by eliminating a tool used for organizing their case docket, known as administrative closure. Administrative closure, much like law enforcement’s prosecutorial discretion, allows judges to prioritize cases. It also provides immigrants stuck in a visa backlog or awaiting other legal relief a temporary reprieve from deportation.

Sessions, along with Trump, has signaled a clear distaste for the asylum system as a whole and a cynicism toward the majority of immigrants seeking refuge, saying they have taken advantage of the system and falsely claiming that 80 percent of asylum applications are without merit. Meanwhile, Trump has voiced a more fundamental issue with due process for non-citizens, even tweeting that undocumented immigrant should be deported “immediately, with no Judges or Court Cases.”

Faced with the pressure to meet strict quotas and stripped of the ability to handle their case dockets efficiently, judges may have little option but to cut corners or risk losing their jobs. The unprecedented structural changes pushed by Sessions amount to a greasing of the court system so as to create a slicker path to deportation for as many immigrants as possible.

The biennial Gallup poll on Americans’ sentiments toward capitalism and socialism came out this week, and the numbers tell us a lot, particularly about today’s Democrats. As in the 2016 poll, the share of Democrats who have a favorable view of socialism remains both high and essentially unchanged: 58 percent two years ago, 57 percent today.

In this year’s poll, however, for the first time the share of Democrats who view socialism favorably has taken a non-trivial lead over the share who feel the same way about capitalism. Two years ago, 56 percent of Democrats had a positive view of capitalism, essentially tying it with socialism (however much that meant that some Democrats had a positive view of both, and, for all we know, a positive view of a whole lot of things). This year, by contrast, the share of Democrats viewing capitalism positively tumbled to 47 percent—a full ten points beneath the share looking kindly on socialism.

It’s easy to read too much into these numbers (after all, yesterday’s poll showed that 16 percent of Republicans had a positive view of socialism, though this finding, like much of quantum mechanics, runs counter to reality as humans have experienced it). When many Democrats hear the word “socialism,” they think of such popular social democratic programs as Social Security and Medicare, or the single-payer systems and free public universities that exist in Western Europe. When many Republicans hear the word “socialism,” they think of Joseph Stalin.

That said, it’s not hard to see why even minimally sentient beings would be increasingly wary about capitalism, most certainly as it’s currently practiced in the United States. Just yesterday, as Gallup was releasing its data, the Financial Times produced its own analysis of profits, profit margins, and wages in the United States. With 90 percent of the companies in the S&P 500 now having filed their second-quarter reports, profits have risen by 25 percent over the same period last year, and profit margins—how much companies profit from their gross revenues—have hit 11.8 percent, which the FT says is “the highest level since financial information provider FactSet began recording the data in 2008.”

How very nice. Of course, as corporations rake in more profit from their sales, the share of those sales going to wages likely declines—and indeed, that’s exactly what’s happened. That partly explains why real wages have actually gone down over the past year when the rate of inflation (which by historic standards is still pretty low) is taken into account.

So—record-high profit margins, with record amounts then being shoveled to major shareholders through all-time-high share buybacks, while wages stubbornly sag despite low unemployment levels. Americans—Democratic Americans in particular—likely aren’t able to quote you the numbers, but they certainly sense that big money is being generated, and most Americans aren’t getting it.

No wonder Democrats are more and more dubious about capitalism. They should be.

Tax Cuts for the rich. Deregulation for the powerful. Wage suppression for everyone else. These are the tenets of trickle-down economics, the conservatives’ age-old strategy for advantaging the interests of the rich and powerful over those of the middle class and poor. The articles in Trickle-Downers are devoted, first, to exposing and refuting these lies, but equally, to reminding Americans that these claims aren’t made because they are true. Rather, they are made because they are the most effective way elites have found to bully, confuse and intimidate middle- and working-class voters. Trickle-down claims are not real economics. They are negotiating strategies. Here at the Prospect, we hope to help you win that negotiation.

The Trump administration’s targeting of federal employee unions is unsurprising, considering its transparent disdain for labor. But this Friday, a major federal union plans to fight back with a union-wide campaign.

The National Treasury Employees Union, which represents 150,000 federal workers in 31 agencies, recently filed a grievance against the Department of Health and Human Services over “bad faith bargaining tactics.” In the grievance, NTEU says that HHS negotiators broke a number of bargaining rules during a negotiation over the union contract. HHS plans to eliminate telework and alternative-schedule options as well as public transportation subsidies and other benefits.

NTEU claims that HHS negotiators refused to explain the Trump administration’s proposals, and demanded counterproposals within three days. According to a statement from NTEU Chapter 254, after just one full day of bargaining, the department invited a mediator into negotiations—an “obvious effort to check that box so it can move forward to the Federal Service Impasse Panel.” Such a move would essentially declare that the two sides came to an impasse and could force the contract to move to the jurisdiction of the presidentially appointed panel.

Just one day later, HHS ended bargaining and submitted its final offer. According to the NTEU grievance, ground rules state that the bargaining schedule is 18 weeks.

The Trump administration’s contract proposals also include requiring union officials to pay rent for their offices, even though those on-site premises have been a part of federal union contracts for years. According to NTEU, the new language that HHS has offered is “almost word-for-word” the language in the illegal contract forced upon workers within the Department of Education in March, when, after negotiations with the American Federation of Government Employees union fell apart, the department announced a new “collective bargaining agreement” with widespread changes and reduced benefits—changes the union said it had not agreed to.

This Friday, NTEU is encouraging all members (not just HHS employees) to use the social media hashtags #SHAMEOnHHS and #UnionStrong, as well as to wear NTEU shirts and stickers bearing the hashtag.

Also on Friday, NTEU President Tony Reardon will deliver a petition to HHS Secretary Alex Azar, signed by nearly 5,000 HHS workers, asking the HHS negotiators to withdraw the proposals that target employee benefits.

“Today it is HHS,” reads a blog post on the NTEU website calling for union-wide solidarity. “Tomorrow it could be your agency.”

With executive orders aimed at curbing the power of federal unions, and attacks on benefits in both the Departments of Education and Agriculture, that may not be hyperbole.

On August 9, 2014, Darren Wilson shot Michael Brown dead in Ferguson, Missouri. In a final act of white supremacy, the police could not be bothered to cover up his mortal remains. As his body lay in the hot Missouri sun, a new civil rights movement erupted.

Because Michael Brown died that day, Wesley Brown now heads to the St. Lous County prosecutor's office.

Like Watts and Detroit and Crown Heights, Ferguson became shorthand for American racial injustice and unrest. It also served as a catalyst for a small group of people to rise up and underscore that “Black Lives Matter,” a simple rendering of a human condition that sparked an international movement.

Ferguson laid bare the instruments of institutional racism. White officials had long balanced the town’s books on the backs of African Americans through a devious if banal regimen of fines and court fees. The outrage, the headlines, and the federal investigations compelled the resignations of the police officer who killed Brown, the police chief, a municipal judge, and several other municipal officials.

Bob McCulloch, the long-time St. Louis County prosecutor charged with investigating the young man’s death was made of sterner stuff. He refused to step aside and bring in a special investigator to handle the probe into the shooting—even though his own police officer father had been killed by a black man, even though he had deep connections among Ferguson’s finest. Riots broke out again after a grand jury declined to indict the officer who shot Brown.

Michael Brown was about same age as Wesley Bell’s own son. Bell’s own father was cop. After Brown’s death, Bell began preaching a gospel of community policing. He ran for Ferguson City Council and won. African Americans had the power of the vote secured by humiliation, bloody beatings, and death. That right had atrophied but was newly ascendant. Then the city council member decided to go after the prosecutor’s seat.

Bob McCulloch personified The System. Wesley Bell campaigned on community policing, promises to reform cash bail, and a pledge not to seek the death penalty. He won a passionate and diverse following of local and national supporters.

What he didn’t have, most people thought, was a chance at winning.

On Tuesday, he polished off McCulloch by a wide margin in Democratic primary. There are no other opponents on the November ballot.

Frederick Douglass had this to say about struggle, progress, and the challenge before Africa’s descendants in America:

If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.

This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral andphysical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong, which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. …

If we ever get free from the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and if needs be, by our lives andthe lives of others.

I know you know that Republicans throw money at the rich. Doctrines may shift, Russia may go from bad guy to BFF, NATO may defend the free world one day and dilute our sovereignty the next, but tax cuts for the rich are the one True North of Republican cosmology. Without it, the party perishes, not only from diminished campaign contributions but from lack of raison d’être.

As to just how much money Republicans throw at the rich, the nonpartisan Institute on Taxation and Economy Policy (ITEP) released a report last month that’s gone largely unremarked in the media but that makes starkly clear just how faithful a friend and lapdog the GOP has been to our wealthiest friends and neighbors. What ITEP did was to total up all the tax reductions to the rich enacted since George W. Bush became president in 2001, subtracting from that total the restoration of higher tax rates on the rich that went through under President Barack Obama.

Here are the numbers: Since 2001, the income tax cuts for the wealthiest 1 percent come to $1,366 billion. The estate tax cuts for the wealthiest 1 percent come to $838 billion. Subtract from these cuts the hikes on the wealthiest 1 percent enacted during the Obama intermission, and we have a grand total of $1,924 billion that the wealthiest have been able to pocket for their rainy day funds.

I think that’s close enough that we can round it up a bit to an even $2,000 billion—which, for those of you who’ve been counting the zeros, is actually $2 trillion.

And that doesn’t count, of course, the additional $100 billion in cuts to capital gains taxes that the administration now says it plans to implement administratively by changing how it calculates the initial value of investments. That $100 billion, too, would flow chiefly to that same 1 percent.

But back to that $2 trillion: By a curious coincidence, that was also the amount that the administration proposed to save in its (mercifully, not very enactable) 2019 budget by reducing spending on Medicaid ($1.4 trillion), Medicare ($530 billion) and Social Security ($25 billion)—which comes in at a cool $1.955 trillion. As with the tax cut to the 1 percent, let’s just round that to $2 trillion, too.

So: Republican presidents and congresses have cut the taxes of the 1 percent by $2 trillion over the past 17 years, and Trump has now proposed to cut spending on Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security by the same $2 trillion.

Democratic campaign consultants, do with this what you will.

Tax Cuts for the rich. Deregulation for the powerful. Wage suppression for everyone else. These are the tenets of trickle-down economics, the conservatives’ age-old strategy for advantaging the interests of the rich and powerful over those of the middle class and poor. The articles in Trickle-Downers are devoted, first, to exposing and refuting these lies, but equally, to reminding Americans that these claims aren’t made because they are true. Rather, they are made because they are the most effective way elites have found to bully, confuse and intimidate middle- and working-class voters. Trickle-down claims are not real economics. They are negotiating strategies. Here at the Prospect, we hope to help you win that negotiation.

Ohio’s razor-thin vote for an open House seat got most of the headlines, but the bigger story was the defeat of a right-to-work ballot proposition in supposedly right-wing Missouri.

The bill to make Missouri America’s 28th state with a “right to work” law was passed by the legislature in 2017 and signed by then–Republican Governor Eric Greitens. But the labor movement qualified a ballot initiative overturning the measure, and it passed by a margin of 2 to 1, including in very conservative parts of a state carried overwhelmingly by Trump.

The “right to work” option was added to labor law by the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act. Passed by the Republican 80th Congress over President Truman’s veto (he denounced it as a “slave labor act”), Taft-Hartley allows states to pass laws permitting workers to opt out of paying union dues even when a majority of workers sign union cards.

The name “right to work” was always a fraud. Even in states without such laws, anybody can take a job at a unionized facility. Workers merely have to join, or if they don’t want to join, to pay dues after they are hired.

“Right to work” makes it much harder to organize in such states. Until the last few decades, these measures were largely confined to the anti-union South and Mountain West. Lately, they have been enacted in Michigan, Indiana, and Wisconsin. In the past decade, they've been beaten with ballot initiatives in California and Ohio.

The Missouri vote not only extends and intensifies that success in a supposedly far more conservative state. It shows the latent appeal of pocketbook issues and trade unionism even in Trump country. It shows that the labor movement may be down, but it is far from out.

In Missouri, just 8.7 percent of workers are members of unions. But most working families know someone with a union job and they know the difference a union can make.

The right to have a union signals concern for the forgotten working class. By trying to crush labor, Missouri Republicans signaled not individual rights—the usual pitch for the misnamed “right to work” law—but their contempt for working people, who got the message.

The Missouri outcome also bodes well for the re-election of Senator Claire McCaskill, one of the supposedly endangered Democrats up this fall. More importantly, it signals the resurgence of the labor movement—and reminds Democrats that progressive economics are the indispensable ingredient for success on the beaten-down American heartland.

At a House hearing regarding expanding broadband internet access across the country on July 25, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai said that closing the “digital divide” was a “top priority” during his tenure as chairman.

If that’s the case, then he certainly has a surprising approach to doing so.

In November 2017, the Republican-dominated FCC leadership voted to consider a proposal to restructure the Lifeline program—sometimes called “Obamaphone” by conservative critics—which provides subsidies for broadband and phone access to low-income Americans. The program provides a $9.25 per month discount to individuals or families who are either at or below 135 percent of the federal poverty guidelines—$16,389 per year for an individual, $33,885 per year for a family of four—or who qualify for other government assistance programs, like SNAP or Medicaid.

The obvious effect of the proposal is to limit access to phone and broadband service to low-income Americans, which of course would widen the digital gap that Pai claims to want to close. According to a 2017 Pew Research Center poll, almost 30 percent of adults with an income below $30,000 per year don’t have smartphones, and roughly half don’t have home broadband services or a computer of some kind. Among adults making $30,000 to $99,000 a year, 81 percent have a smartphone, 87 percent, a computer of some kind, and 80 percent, broadband internet. Nearly 100 percent of adults with an income over $100,000 have access to all three.

As of 2015, 12.5 million people subscribed to the Lifeline program, with 400,000 subscribers living on tribal lands. Two tribal organizations, the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe and the Oceti Sakowin Tribal Utility Authority, along with several smaller wireless carriers, have sued the FCC over this proposal, which seeks specifically to cut an enhanced $25 subsidy for tribal residents in “urban” areas, and makes the enhanced subsidy unavailable to subscribers who buy from wireless resellers, effective immediately. Tribal groups even submitted a petition to the FCC to hold off on enacting the proposal until the court case is decided, but the FCC denied the petition.

The restructuring would also affect survivors of domestic abuse and those living in abusive households, a report by Mother Jones found. Domestic violence affects women’s ability to be financially self-sufficient, and abusers often cut women off from various support systems, making subsidized cell phones a literal lifeline to those who would otherwise be separated from society, the report finds.

Residents of Puerto Rico, who are still recovering from the devastation to cell phone and internet infrastructure from Hurricane Maria, are also in the crossfire of this restructuring: 17 percent of Puerto Ricans use Lifeline, and the proposed cuts could be a “death sentence” for subscribers, Luis Belén, CEO of the National Health IT Collaborative for the Underserved told Newsweek. The restructuring would also affect veterans, who make up 12 percent of the program and the many more active duty military members and their families who would qualify for the Lifeline program.

The proposed restructuring would slash the benefits provided through Lifeline by limiting subsidies. Recipients would only be eligible for discounts through “facilities-based providers,” such as Comcast, which have their own physical network infrastructure to provide wireless service to consumers. This is opposed to “wireless resellers,” such as Virgin Mobile or Straight Talk, which are smaller companies that buy network access from these larger facilities networks and resell this access to consumers.

These “mobile virtual network operators” (MVNOs) usually offer cheaper, prepaid phone options that don’t require good credit to purchase. Such a move would effectively cut off 70 percent of Lifeline users that rely on wireless resellers for coverage, and instead push subscribers to larger providers such as AT&T and Verizon.

The plan also proposes an annual cap on Lifeline disbursements, changing the original Lifeline structure in which the amount spent on disbursements was more flexible. Prior to this proposal, if disbursements exceeded 90 percent of the overall Lifeline yearly budget, a report would have to be filed to explain how funding was used, but ultimately, the increased spending was allowed.

If the proposal is enacted, the new budget would have a self-enforcing mechanism that would put a cap on disbursement spending automatically if it overtook its allotted portion of the overall budget, limiting the flexibility of disbursement spending. This type of cap could potentially bar those who qualify for Lifeline from ever getting subsidies, depending on where the cap is set.

The restructuring proposal could take effect in October, pending approval by the Office of Management and Budget.

The proposal is supposedly aimed at cutting down fraud and abuse, despite claims from over 200 advocacy groups—including the ACLU, the NAACP, and Common Cause— in an open letter to Pai that Lifeline has aided in reducing the digital divide in rural and poor communities. That isn’t stopping the FCC from going ahead with a restructuring proposal that targets millions of marginalized people.

A program that takes away vital connections to today’s online world from veterans, American Indians, low-income Americans, and others seems hardly a solution for closing the digital divide— if anything, it works to exacerbate it.